The autonomous driving landscape takes shape
Volkswagen appears to be in talks with Huawei with a view to acquiring the Chinese company’s autonomous driving unit created in 2019 employing more than 5,000 people with a $1 billion R&D budget last year. Huawei’s plans for its autonomous driving unit did not at any time point to the manufacture of automobiles, but rather to a role as a technology supplier that the company itself compared to that of Germany’s Bosch.
The move reflects the rapid advances in autonomous driving technology and the growing number of partnerships in the sector: Volkswagen with Argo AI, Amazon with Zoox, Intel taking its autonomous driving unit public in 2022 after the acquisition of Mobileye in 2017, or Apple continuing to play its cards close to its chest, along with steady progress from Waymo, which is already thinking about making vehicles without steering wheel or pedals, China’s AutoX, which already has a fleet of more than 1,000 vehicles, and of course Yandex, the Russian outfit that is making substantial progress in autonomous driving in snow and bad weather conditions.
As a result, a competition landscape is taking shape: fewer and fewer companies are conducting tests in real traffic in California, but more and more miles are being driven. The deployment of robotaxi fleets has long been a reality in some cities without a safety driver, circulating under…
